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Making Presentations to Capital Investors: Best Practices Guide

Ankit Duggal
5 min read
Making Presentations to Capital Investors: Best Practices Guide

Finding potential capital investors is tough enough. Now comes the even tougher part of reaching them and making an awe inspiring presentation. The goal of reaching and presenting (R&P) is to build credibility regarding your capabilities as a real estate operator. You will not be able to convince them to give you money on the spot. Rather, this step will help you start the conversation towards that eventual funding.

Reaching Capital Investors

Last time we spoke about how to find and compile a list of potential and prospective capital investors (How to Build Your List of Local Private Lenders), now it is time to start marketing to them.  A Side Note: Marketing is a core skill set needed to be a real estate investment operator/entrepreneur, as you should always be marketing for either Assets, Buyers, or Capital. (ABC- goes along with the other ABC acronym of Always Be Closing). The question is how can you reach this list of local private lenders that you  have spent a couple of days to a few weeks putting together. Here are two simple rules of thumb that should  yield a higher response rate:

  1. Educate Not Sell:

    Develop a marketing deliverable i.e. postcard, flyer, or letter that promotes an education rather than a sales oriented marketing message. Marketing messages that have yielded me success have included educational seminar invites, round table video conference invites and free local market research & deal reports. The goal of the marketing message is to educate potential capital investors on potential investment opportunities available within their local real estate market. This type of marketing is called Content Marketing and it is the evolution of offline marketing that I have seen the most success implementing from a response rate standpoint.

  2. Consistency:

    Content marketing is a marathon . The key rules to conquering this marathon are that steady and quality content wins the highest response rate. Gone are the days of template marketing postcards and letters provided by real estate gurus at thousands of dollar a weekend workshops in my personal opinion. Rather real estate investors should aim  to produce a 7 to 8 point touch point messages/deliverable that provide consistent, useful and relevant information for your audience of local capital investors.

Getting capital investors to respond to your marketing is more of an art than science, as it a recipe that blends marketing message, consistency and A/B testing (Learn more about A/B testing) together. It will take a few iterations  to find the right recipe – but once you do, you will be successful in grabbing capital investors in all your future marketing efforts. Keep iterating and keep testing until you find the response success formula.

Presenting to Capital Investors

Investors are people just like you and me.  They want to know ‘what’s in it for me’. They have two key ingredients that you are looking for:

  1. money to invest and
  2. motivated to invest because they like to make money with their money.

However, they have little time and may consistently be bombarded with investment opportunities. Hence the key to a good presentation is providing some great takeaways and make your presentation stand out. Easier said than done – unless you follow a game plan on how to create a winning presentation. Remember the key point of this first presentation is to educate and instill credibility. I have a few key slides on that you should include in your capital raising presentation:

1) Executive Summary: This slide is your elevator pitch. An elevator pitch is a brief, persuasive statement that you use to spark interest in what your investment strategy and where you see the market opportunity.  A good elevator pitch should last no longer than a short elevator ride of 20 to 30 seconds, hence the name. (Want to learn more about an elevator pitch: Read this link).

2)Real Estate Investing 101: Across as a couple of slides provide the capital investor an understanding of the real estate investing life cycle along, key assets classes and investment styles available to them i.e. buy & hold, buy & flip, active v. passive involvement. These slides will help provide capital investor a base line understanding of the real estate investment market.

3) Market Opportunity: Utilize a few slides to explain to them the specific market opportunity that you are seeing within your local real estate investment market.  Be specific as to the “Whys” behind the market opportunities. These slides will help build credibility as a real estate market “expert” within the minds of the capital investors.

4) Investment Strategy: This slide is your opportunity to  show the potential capital investor how smart you truly are; define the target strategy that you feel will take advantage of the market opportunity identified. These slides will help build your cache as a real estate investor and your analysis capabilities.

5) Case Study: Include a sample case study of a deal that you have done or a prospective deal that you see in the market that walks through your investment strategy and shows the potential profit available from the execution of the strategy.

DISCLAIMER: Do not break down the potential profit that the investor can make if you are showing an active deal in the market as that can be considered capital raising. If you use a historical track record deal then that is fine for show what your prior capital investors made from practicing in this prior deal as you are not raising funds of it rather it is just for informational purpose only.

How to Give a Good Presentation

Keep these slides in mind as you develop your capital raising presentation. In the spirit of making presentations, I want to share a few best practices that I have found to make presentations go smoother and establish your credibility even further.

Length of Presentation

. Limit your presentation to 20-30 minutes as excessively long presentations can bore investors and unduly short ones can leave investors wondering if they are being told everything, presentations of 20-30 minutes can usually provide an adequate overview and leave sufficient time to answer investor questions.

Question-and-Answer Sessions

. Questions from investors are an inevitable part of investor presentations. Investors need to be prepared to answer questions on themselves, the real estate market, and their strategy. Use this part of the presentation to further cement your credibility as a real estate investment operator!

Follow-Up:

Real Estate investors should follow up with capital investors within a few days of the presentation, but they should be careful not to badger him or her with multiple queries. “Many investors test the mettle of the investor especially when raising capital  by seeing how long it take him or her to follow up. If it’s not forthcoming, even for reasons of perceived courtesy, many investors get turned off. On the other side of the coin, calling every day doesn’t work, either.”

The three steps to finding, reaching and presenting to potential capital investors have been laid out and presented. I hope you find these two posts helpful as you continue your capital raising journey.

I would love to hear your presentation slide ideas and best practices associated with making presentations. If readers can share 50 ideas in the comments then I will share here my actual investor presentation here for you to use as a best practices guide. Can we do it? Leave your tips or questions below!
Photo: Martino Sabia

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.